Table of Contents
ALSO BY ROB SHEFFIELD :
LOVE IS A MIX TAPE : LIFE AND
LOSS, ONE SONG AT A TIME
for Ally
LOOK AT THE TWO PEOPLE DANCING ON EITHER
SIDE OF YOU. IF YOU DONT SEE A GIRL,
YOU ARE DANCING INCORRECTLY.
THE KEYBOARDIST FOR LCD SOUNDSYSTEM
Introduction
If you ever step into the Wayback Machine and zip to the 1980s, you will have some interesting conversations, even though nobody will believe a word you say. You can tell people the twentieth century will end without a nuclear war. The Soviet Union will dissolve, the Berlin Wall will come down, and people will start using these things called ringtones that make their pants randomly sing Eye of the Tiger. America will elect a black president who spent his college days listening to the B-52s.
But theres one claim nobody will believe: Duran Duran are still famous.
I cant believe it myself. Ive always been a Duran Duran fan. I was an 80s kid, so I grew up on them. I watched Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes give Save a Prayer its world premiere live on MTV. I listened hard to the lyrics of Is There Something I Should Know? and pondered its existential vision of romantic love. I have studied their fashion, learned their wives names, bought their solo albums. Ive always been obsessed with Duran Duran. But even more so, Ive been obsessed with how girls talk about them. Im pretty sure Duran Duran would cease to exist if girls ever stopped talking about them. Except they never do.
Talking to girls about Duran Duran? Its how Ive spent my life. I count on the Fab Five to help me understand all the females in my lifeall the crushes and true loves, the sisters and housemates, the friends and confidantes and allies and heroes. Girls like to talk, and if you are a boy and you want to learn how to listen to girl talk, start a conversation and keep it going, that means you have to deal with Duran Duran. You learn to talk about what the girls want to talk about. And it is a truth universally acknowledged that the girls want to talk about Duran Duran.
My little sister Caroline understands. Its like talking to boys about wrestling, she says. You cant just name check, oh, Hulk Hogan or Roddy Piper, because all that means is you used to watch WWF with your brother. So you have to act casual and mention Billy Jack Haynes or Hercules Hernandez. Then the boys are putty in your hands.
Ive never heard of these wrestlers, though I assume my sister knows what shes talking about. But I guess Duran Duran are an obsession for me because they were the girls band that I loved and because I loved them at a time when I was figuring out what it meant to be a guy. So trying to figure them out is how I keep figuring myself out.
Theres a character in a Kingsley Amis novel who asks, Why did I like womens breasts so much? I was clear on why I liked them, thanks, but why did I like them so much? I wonder the same thing about Duran Duran. I get why women love them, but why do women love them so much? I feel like if I could solve that riddle, I could solve a lot of others.
The Durannies liked girls. Like Bowie or the Beatles, they liked girls enough to want to look like girls. The admiration was mutual, and at this point they have been famous and beloved for thirty years. Its fair to say that at the time, we all thought this band would be forgotten by now, yet everyone in the Western world can still sing Hungry Like the Wolf. Simon, Nick, John, Andy and Roger remain icons of adolescent female desire. Even the tenderoni who werent even born in the 80s know what Girls on Film is about and nurture that special relationship all ladies seem to share with John. (Sometimes also Roger. Frequently Simon. Not Andy.) How did this happen?
The 80s, obviously. I was thirteen when the 80s began and twenty-three when they ended, so this was the era of my adolescence, and I never figured anybody would remember the 80s fondly after they were over. But like everything else that happened in the 80s, Duran Duran symbolize teenage yearnings. Girls still grow up memorizing Pretty in Pink and Dirty Dancing during those constant weekend TV marathons. Any time Sixteen Candles comes on, my sisters can recite every scene word for word. (If Im lucky, I get in a few Jake lines.) When Michael Jackson, John Hughes and Patrick Swayze died, these were national days of mourning. Every night in your town, you can find a bar somewhere hosting an Awesome 80s Prom Night, where you can count on a steady loop of Tainted Love and Billie Jean and Just Like Heaven. Any wedding I attend degenerates into a room full of Tommys and Ginas screaming Livin on a Prayer. If that doesnt happen, the couple could probably get an annulment.
If you were famous in the 80s, you will never be not famous. (In theoretical physics, this principle is formally known as the Justine Bateman Constant.) Any group that was popular in the 80s can still pack a room. When 80s darlings Depeche Mode come to town, my wife, Ally, begins picking out her dress weeks before the show, even though I already know its going to be the short black one. And I know Im her date for the show, and I know she will look deep into my eyes when Dave Gahan sings A Question of Lust. We played Kajagoogoos Too Shy at our wedding and nobody even walked out.
Ive built my whole life around loving music. Im a writer for Rolling Stone, so I am constantly searching for new bands and soaking up new sounds. When I started out as a music journalist, at the end of the 1980s, it was generally assumed that we were living through the lamest music era the world would ever see. But those were also the years when hip- hop exploded, beatbox disco soared, indie rock took off, and new wave invented a language of teen angst. All sorts of futuristic electronic music machines offered obnoxious noises for the plundering. All kinds of bold feminist ideas were inspiring pop stars to play around with gender roles and sexual politics, on a level that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier. The radio could be your jam, whether you were a new-wave kid, a punk rocker, a disco fan, a hip- hop head, a Morrissey acolyte or a card- carrying member of the Cinderella Fan Club. I was every one of these at some time or anotherI loved it all.
But even I didnt think there was so much going on in the 80s that people would still be trying to figure out all these years later. I didnt expect Id still be trying to figure it out either. A few years ago, I went to the Rocklahoma festival, devoted to the 80s hair-metal bands. I stood in a field, surrounded for the first and last time by thirty thousand of my fellow Quiet Riot fans, listening to the band play Metal Health (Bang Your Head). Was it strange? Very. Did it rock? Brutally.
Its always weird to see how the Hair Decade lives on, even for people barely old enough to remember it. Every week, in my neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, I go and see young bands getting brand-new kicks out of 80s beats. At the time, we all figured we were stuck in an Epoch of Bogus. The country was in horrific shape, with Reagan and his cronies running amok. It was customary to blame music for the poisonous state of the nation. Nobody would have suspected that anyone would ever go to the movies to relive 1985 (
